Plain English with Derek Thompson - BONUS POD: The Future of Democracy, the Media, and the Economy With Andrew Yang

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

In our first weekend special, Andrew interviews Derek about the state of the economy, and Derek interviews Andrew about the various plagues of U.S. politics. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Andrew Yang Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is a bonus weekend edition, and the story of this episode begins about four years ago. I was living in New York City, and a friend invited me to talk about my work at Soho House, which is a sort of fancy restaurant hotel club thing, where everybody is dressed with annoying perfection and alarmingly perfect hair, and I'm feeling a little bit out of place. And just before my talk, I meet some of the other speakers who are there. And one of them is this jubilant, broad-smiling guy who says he's read some of my articles about the future of work. And, oh, by the way, he's running for president. And I think, good luck, man.

There are a lot of interesting ways to blow up three years of your life, but that is probably the most interesting option of all of them. And his name is Andrew Yang. I will say this for Andrew. He has definitely had a more interesting four years since. than I have. He has become a political celebrity. He's run for president. He's run for mayor of New York. And now he started a third political party. So a few weeks ago, Andrew reached out to me, and he said, Derek, do you want to come on my podcast to talk about the economy? And I responded rudely, no, do you want to come on my podcast and talk about politics? So both of us answered yes,

compromise, and we had this great hour-long conversation that you're about to hear. Andrew and I agree about a lot, but we do not see the world in exactly the same way. I think he is more certain than I am that robots are taking our jobs, and I think he's more optimistic than I am, that a third party is the most efficient vehicle for rescuing American democracy. But what I like about Andrew, what I really, really like about Andrew, is that he cares about reality. And it might seem like a kind of absurd compliment of a person, but when it comes to modern

politics, it might be the highest compliment you can pay. The dude really cares about reality. He cares about seeing the world as it is. So as you're about to hear, the interview breaks more or less to two parts. In the first half, Andrew interviews me about my outlook on the economy, remote work, social media. And in the second half, I interview Andrew about the state of politics and the prospects for a third party in America. And finally, what it's actually like to run for president. As always, thank you for listening. If you like this podcast, please follow, rate, review. And here is Andrew Yang.

I am so pumped to be on plain English with Derek Thompson because this podcast is going to explain the world to a lot of people. Thanks for having me, Derek. I reference your work all the time when I'm trying to figure out what's going on in the economy. You know, you and I have known each other for a while. You've written several books about different aspects of the hitmaker economy. So I'm going to lead off with a question on everyone's mind, which I'm sure people ask you at cocktail parties and the rest of it, much to your chagrin. What the hell is going on with this economy?

Like, where are we right now? It's so funny. So we just recorded a podcast about this. And my one sentence summary of where things stand is all the good news has an asterisk and all the bad news has a silver lining. So you pick some piece of good news. Like, look, unemployment is lower now than it was in any month of 2016. That's an extraordinary achievement after the pandemic. At the same time, one of the reasons why unemployment is so low is because we're missing

six, seven million people from the labor force. There is a large number of people who retired early because they're afraid of the pandemic. There are people who are waiting out the pandemic on the sidelines because they don't feel comfortable working or they really hate a job they just quit. Or maybe they have a financial cushion, and that's obviously good. We don't want to force people to work starvation jobs. But there's a piece of good news that has a little bit of an asterisk. Then all the bad news has a silver lining.

Like, look, inflation is real, and it's the highest that has been in a long time, maybe more than 30 years. It's higher when you look at gasoline prices, the year-over-year inflation rate is one of the highest prints on record. At the same time, the high inflation rate is partly in evidence of some good things that are happening. A demand is so much higher than we thought it would be maybe a year ago. People are spending a lot.

Retail numbers are up. Restaurants are roaring back. The supply chain can't yet meet all of this demand. And as a result, it's cashing out as high inflation. So the way that I think about this economy is that, you know, in the 1970s, we invented this portmanteau of a stagflation economy, stagnation plus inflation. Yeah. Jimmy Carter is stagflation.

That's like the great fear. Yeah, this is not stagflation. This is kaboomflation. This is a booming economy that is also stagflation. that is also seeing inflation. And I think it's really important to distinguish the bad growth that we saw in the 1970s from the accelerating growth that we're seeing right now coming out of the pandemic. A lot of good stuff is happening, but it all has an asterisk.

Growflation. We need a term. You know, I guess if you're the Biden administration, you just want to avoid this term stagflation and Jimmy Carter Redux, which I think is the vibe. Unfortunately, we'll return to that a little bit later on. I'm not sure if Kaboomflation is going to come. catch though, Derek. I got to be honest. So we need something else. Bullflation. I, like, I don't know. Work on it. By the end of this conversation, let's try and coin this term.

You got it. Yeah. We got boomflation. We got bullflation. Capalflation. Well, there's a lot of dash fulations that we can throw out there. And I'll sort of have it on. I'll have that program running on background as we speak. Please do. I know you're capable of multiple cycles. So let's dig into each of the pieces you just described. So you said, headline unemployment reads as being quite low, but people have dropped out of the workforce. And one of the facts that I just saw reported that you retweeted actually, it was out of Ben Castleman, which is that we're still missing 4.2 million jobs since before the pandemic. A lot of that's in hospitality and leisure. So the first question is, what is going on with these 6 million or so people that have?

have left the workforce, and how should we think about the labor market? Healthy, unhealthy? I think previously very unhealthy and getting healthier. I mean, we basically put the economy into a forced coma in April 2020. So we are coming from a flash freeze recession in the spring and early summer of last year, and we're coming out of it. We added more than 500,000 jobs last month. I mean, in any normal time, that would be an absolutely.

enormous number of jobs. Yeah, which was less than what a lot of people were hoping or projecting from way before. So in absolute terms, it's good, but was it fair to say that people were hoping for better X months ago? Is that right? I think if you look at the three-month running average, we're getting a little bit technical here, but if you look at the three-month running average, right, like the general trend is a little bit slower than people were hoping, but last month's number was really, really strong, and I think we can continue to build on it as hopefully fingers crossed, knocking on whatever would is available. COVID fears continue to decline. vaccines continue to move through.

Boosters continue to improve the general level of antibodies, and we don't see the same spike in deaths this winter that we saw last winter. And there's a lot of reasons to believe that this winter, especially into early spring, we're going to have a really healthy labor market. Lots of job growth, and not just job growth. Andrew, this is something I know that you're interested in. If you look at wage growth and where wage growth is the strongest,

it's not at the top, it's not the middle, it's at the bottom. Wages are growing fastest for the low income, and they're growing fastest because as leisure and hospitality comes back online, restaurants and retailers are having to raise wages to keep people working there, because otherwise, what are they doing? They're quitting. Great resignation. The most Americans on record just quit their jobs last month, and the period, or the sector with the most job quits, was accommodation food services, so hotels and restaurants and bars. You put all this together, and my brief summary is, things were really bad last year. They are getting better for sure. They are getting better a little bit slower than we were hoping. And they're getting better with this other asterisk, which is inflation is higher than we expected that it would be in part because supply chains are too constricted to provide for all the demand that's coming from the U.S. economy. So to the extent that there is still pain or lag in the economy, and we're going to try to unpack this great resignation, which is on everyone's minds. Anytime you go out to eat or to shop,

you see help wanted signs everywhere. You know, people are like, hey, you know, jobs available, come, come apply. And I believe that's one of the reasons why we're seeing wages go up at the low end. People are like, well, and people aren't applying to jobs. It's just like, you know, I guess we're going to have to raise our wages. Someone said in an article, employers think that 15 bucks an hours a lot of money until they find out that's what McDonald's is offering. So there is this baseline that's coming up. So the folks that have left those jobs and are kind of waiting to be enticed back in, how are they able to make ends meet? Do we have a sense? Is it because they received enhanced unemployment benefits before? And haven't most of those programs at this point

stopped applying to the same level? I think it's a really good. question. It's a little bit of a mystery to me why we see such a large labor force drop out, like six to seven million jobs or people looking for jobs. That is a lot. That's basically the labor force of Pennsylvania that we're missing from the economy, even though overall GDP is basically higher than it was before the pandemic started. Like that is definitely a mystery that I don't want to pretend I have 100% of the answer to. But if you're going to piece together an answer, it's pretty clear to me where the pieces start. They start with savings that people have from last year because they weren't going on trips. They weren't doing special stuff

because the economy was shut down. It comes from the stimulus checks, obviously, as you said. It comes from enhanced unemployment benefits. As you said, you piece it all together, and I can sort of begin to see how you have this sort of financial cushion. But then you move away from financial cushions, and you also have COVID, right? People might still be afraid of catching this in a restaurant or in a hotel, so they're not applying to those jobs. You might also have the fact that because schools are still a little bit messed up, you have moms and dads who don't want to leave the house. They want to stay home and be there in case their kid has to be forced out of school, in case, you know, school is shut down for a week because there's a COVID

case or two. So there are a bunch of different health and economic and psychological reasons why people are sort of holding out from the economy. And I think if you piece it all together, you have the basis of an explanation for this labor shortage mystery. I think a lot of it's burnout. I think a lot of it's mental fatigue. At least some of the folks I talked to just were like, screw this and went home and then have just been figuring it out. And I see this in a variety of fields. I just saw a piece about how health care workers are burning out, which we all understand. But it's not just in that industry. It seems like it's all over. There's been a lot of rethinking. I almost feel like we had this very strict conditioning that

then got broken during COVID. And now when you say to folks, hey, you know, do what you'd always done. A lot of people are very, very hesitant and trying to figure out a new path. A lot of people moved. You know, I've seen the relocation rates have been significantly higher than normal, which we can talk a little bit about when we talk about whether remote work is here to stay and what the heck that means. But so your characterization of the labor market is like, hey, it's been really,

really sick when it's getting better. and we're not sure about some of the adjustments because, you know, like the fact is that there are a few different pieces to it. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think you mentioned two things I think are really important to talk about a little bit more. One is the fact that people are reassessing exactly what the role of work should be in their life. They're burning out of their jobs. They're taking some time to rethink their career or rethink, you know, what they're going to do for a living. And I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. In large part, I think the great resignation is for workers great.

It's wonderful that people can have an opportunity to make that calculation. I mean, in an economy, let's imagine some sort of Earth-2 American economy, which isn't so different maybe than Earth 1, where a lot of Americans feel like they don't have the opportunity to quit if they're burned out. They don't have the opportunity to quit if they feel like they just don't want to do their job anymore. They have to work or they're going to starve and their family will starve. It's not a world that I want. It's not a world that I know it's not a world that you want,

especially with your interest in UBI. But fortunately, with these checks and the savings and unemployment and expanded unemployment benefits, I think people do have this freedom to have a great reset. And then in addition to the great reset, you also have this great reshuffling. You have people moving more than they used to. We had declining migration in the U.S., declining sort of intercity and interstate migration in the U.S. I think since the 1970s, it was a pretty long period of declining mojo in this country. And in the last two years, people are moving more.

They're moving to the suburbs of MetaS they live in. They're moving between cities. I think that's a good thing, too. I think that, you know, I want an economy where people don't feel so precarious and so desperate to work that they can't experiment a little bit in their life. They can't move to a city to check it out. Try on a job and quit if they don't like it and explore the skills that work best for them and then figure out which one is their favorite and jump all into a career there.

I want people to feel that sense of exploration, and you need a little bit, I think, of economic safety net laying in order for people to experiment. We've laid a lot of net in the last year and a half. And as a result, I think you're seeing a healthy amount of experimentation. And do we think that remote work is here to stay? And then what does that mean? Like, are we happy about that? I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are happy about that. I think it's absolutely here to stay. I think it's important to be clear about who it's here to stay for, right? So white-collar workers are already a minority of the workforce, and those that can or already working remotely are also a minority of that minority, right? So it's not a,

it's not a huge number of people relative to the overall economy that are working remotely, but it's still millions and millions of people. And my whole thing on remote work when I'm having conversations about it, and I've been doing a lot of writing and thinking about it, is the theme here is small changes can have big. effects. Small changes can have big effects. Let's just assume that only say 10 to 20 percent of white-collar workers, knowledge workers, right? Media, marketing, stuff you can do with a computer. Let's assume it's only 10, 20 percent of them continue to work remotely for the foreseeable future. On the one hand, that means 80 percent of them are going back to the office for the most part, right?

So some people are going to say, oh, look, remote work, it failed. But the 10 to 20 percent difference is huge. If, let's say, you live in New York, if New York subway ticket sales, decline by, let's say, you know, 7 to 12 percent, that is potentially devastating for the city of New York. If you have offices that are always 20 percent at least empty on any given day. And by the way, you're kind of, you know, like you're being very, very conservative in these estimates. I mean, because right now it's actually reversed where the offices are 20 percent occupied and 80 percent unoccupied. You're exactly right. I'm trying, I'm starting with the conservative take and trying to prove just how dramatic even the conservative take is.

Exactly what you said. So let's say the offices are 20, 30, 40 percent empty for the foreseeable future. That's massive for consumer rents, for commercial rents. That's a massive deal for businesses in downtown urban areas that benefit from all of the work lunches that are sold when the offices are filled or all the window shopping that people do when they are walking between offices on their way to work. So my big thing here again is small changes can that big a effects, the spillover effects of a 10% remote work revolution could be absolutely massive. All right. So Derek Thompson, work from home is here to stay. That's something that he's thinking deeply about. And so what does that mean for the organizations? So you're saying, look, second-tier

cities are probably going to have some new people, which I agree with. You're going to see a bit less centralization of talent and human capital and organizational energy. I do get the sense that a lot of the big orgs are shrugging and saying, all right, you want to live there? I guess we'll work with that. Like they're losing that particular tug of war. How do you feel about the continuation of remote work? Are you positive, negative, neutral?

I talked to a lot of people who are negative on it, just to share that, where people who run organizations unhappy. people, obviously people who, for example, run restaurants and retail establishments in some these areas unhappy. Like, how do you feel about it? I think that it depends on who you talk to, and there's a bunch of different sort of spectra that you can look at, right? So one of them is a psychological spectrum, introverts versus extroverts. The introverts that I know... Wow, you're getting deep here, Derek. I'm starting here. I'm starting here. So, like, the introverts that I know are so, so happy with remote work. Like, they go to the office and what are

the experience in the office? People are constantly trying to talk to them. They're constantly trying to blabber about nothing. People always yelling at them and bullying them, you know, just being like freaking introvert and then like taking their, their trapper keepers and throwing them on the ground. All of this. All of this. Yes. And so they're thinking, like, it is so much more calm and happy when I'm at home. Like my mental health has never been better. So they're obviously happy to stay home and not commute into an office where they can be, you know, assaulted with impromptu conversation. At the same time, the extroverts, I know, especially the... Assaulted with impromptu friendliness. I believe I'm definitely talking to an extrovert right now. I would consider

myself somewhere in the middle. Look, I should also say, like, for the Briggs-Meyer doubters out there, I think introvers is definitely... I mean, you've written books, so you're probably an introvert. That's like a general thing. Rule of mind is, like, if someone had the patience to sit there and write a book, they're probably introverted. You've written twice as many books as I have, sir. So I don't know if you would consider yourself an introvert. I am an introvert. Anyone who saw me as a kid would know.

I'll just be sitting under a tree reading some Dragonlance novel. You know, it wasn't exactly. So, yeah, the extroverses I know in my life are like, get me back to the office. Like, I get confidence in power and feel good about myself when I'm talking to people. So that's one way you can cut up. No one to lord it over in their house. They just start yelling at their dog. being like, listen to me, I have thoughts.

But speaking of, you know, lording thoughts over your dog, I also think that another spectrum that's important is like, like lower level employees, mid-level employees and managers, right? So I think managers want to get back into the office, for the most part, in my experience. Like, they enjoy managing people in like a live setting.

People that are kind of advanced in their career, but not managers, they're happy to work from anywhere. Like, they're really, really happy to have that freedom to not have the commute. younger workers, I think, feel often like they're missing out on culture if culture to them is just a group slack. If it's just, like, if the office just becomes a group text, that's not an office. That's a group text. And so I think that for some, like, younger employees, they aren't getting necessarily the cultural experience that they want.

So I think it cuts a lot of different ways. And, you know, remote work is one of these things that I sometimes compare it. to like food. Like, it's ridiculous to say that food is good or bad. Some food is good for some people some of the time. And that's what we're going to see with remote work. That it's going to be this unevenly distributed thing that works for some people and not for others.

And it's going to be particularly difficult, I think, for CEOs who are managing large companies that have a wide spectrum of psychological profiles and introverts, a wide spectrum of workers, young, middle-aged, and old. that's where the you know what's really going to hit the fan because I think it's just going to be really difficult to find a solution that works for everybody. Well, I'm really with you, Derek, and the people that I feel bad for

are the young workers who are coming up. Because if you just came out of school and you were trying to figure out how to prove yourself in an organization, I think it's just harder. Or to get a sense as to how to manage people also probably harder because, you know, you aspire to try and become that manager

at some point. I'm going to share something. There is a 20-something-year-old in my life, you know, like a family member who's been working from home and I think is getting depressed as a result. Now, if you were to ask this person, hey, would you prefer remote work or going into the office? They would say remote work. Now, do I think that the remote work is getting them pumped up on a day-to-day basis or even developing them professionally? Not really. but if you ask them their preference, they still would say, well, I prefer working in my sweatpants

to having to commute, like get dressed, go to the office, like do this thing, interact with those horrible other people face-to-face, whatever it is. Like, you know, if you leave it up to them. But I'm not sure that their preference actually matches up to what would help their career over the medium term or even their day-to-day happiness. And I'm, you know, it's like I'm somewhere in the zone too where, like, if you're an advanced professional, you can work from anywhere and you have a family like I do, then, you know, it's like it becomes very, very appealing to say, yeah, let me just beam in. But I do feel for that next

generation. What you're pointing to is something that the psychologist, Dan Gilbert, has called miswanting. It's the idea that we tell ourselves that we want something and then we get that thing and it turns out that that is not the ticket to happiness at all. It can be, anything. It could be a mansion. It could be a 10-hour Netflix binge. It could be a fancy watch. We want these things. We get them. We pass through that gate. And on the other side of the gate is the exact same feeling of wanting, the exact same illusion that, oh, maybe something else will be the ticket to permanent happiness. And of course, nothing is. And I think our phones and social media, you know, just to extend from the remote work conversation, are such a huge driver of

miswanting in the world, in work and life and success. In many ways, remove the friction of having to actually move our bodies out of our house to see other people, when maybe the thing that's most fundamental to happiness is moving our bodies out of familiar places in order to see people that mean something to us. Like, I don't want to be a fuddy-duddy about this. I'm pro-tech. I'm a tech-positive guy. But I think we all know in our bones, we must know that these tools of frictionlessness have downsides. We see it in the statistics, too. Yeah, you and I are aligned on that point for sure. You recently amplified an idea that scared the shit out of me, and I want to share it with everyone.

It's not your idea. Or maybe it is. I'll just share it. So there was a recent consumer confidence survey that said that 87% of Democrats think the economy is good or that positive sentiment, while only 37% of Republicans did. And you noted that this was the largest gulf. in terms of perception of the economic trajectory between parties that you had ever seen, 50%. But then, even more troubling is that this wasn't only on one side or the other, that back in 2019,

the Gulf actually cut the other direction, where Republicans thought the economy was great, and Democrats thought it sucked by a margin of 47%. And so this is something that scared the shit out of me because what it showed was that, hey, it turns out there is no objective reality to the way we experience the economy. And it's just that if my party is in power, I'm going to be more likely to think good things than if the other parties in power. I think that's the point you were making by retweeers. I'm fiercely nodding my head throughout all of that. For those who can't see the video, yes, I absolutely agree that that is the clear takeaway. Just to do a half step back to set it up because I think that the historical change is really important. So the University of Michigan has been doing this consumer survey for like 60, 70 years. They basically ask a bunch of people, how do you think the economy is going? And since the 1980s, they've been breaking it down, Democrat, Republican, Independent, right? between 1980 and 2017, there had never been more than a 30-point gap between the way Democrats and

Republicans saw the economy, right? Democrats, Republicans, more or less were co-occupants of reality, right? They were experiencing something that we could, that they could agree on was a shared reality. Good times. Good times. We were in the same place, the same economy. And since 2017, it's just gone completely berserk. That if a Republican is the president, just about other Republicans say the economy is great and a lot of the Democrats say the economy is bad, and then when a Democrat is president,

all the Democrats say that the economy is good and all the Republicans say the economy is bad. That's only a slight exaggeration, but that's basically what we started to see. And it basically means exactly what you said, that we used to partially decide whether or not we thought our party was doing a good job by first looking to the economy.

But now we decide if the economy is good by first looking to the party that's in power. Ideology is the pair of glasses that everybody is wearing. And as a result, you might not as well even ask people how good the economy is. You might as well just tell them, hey, do you like Biden or not?

Because once I hear the answer to that question, everything else that I ask you about reality will simply flow downstream of that comment. And it just goes to this point, which again, you write about in your book, and I have a couple questions about your book, which I thought was really, really interesting,

which is that polarization has just eaten up American democracy. You have, am I allowed to, is this horrifyingly embarrassing for me if I read to you from your own book? Very much allowed. Not embarrassing? Okay. All right, so page 249, I think this is a really, really profound point.

You write in the book Open versus Close. to political science book, a bunch of political psychologists ask responders to talk about, to respond to various opinions. They found that disengaged citizens had less of a fixed political identity based upon their psychological profile.

They were more pragmatic and practical when presented with a question. They reacted to a policy by trying to answer, what will this policy do for me? Meanwhile, those who were more politically attentive were more likely to try to answer what will support in this policy say about me?

They were joining a group. What's so interesting about this observation is that you would think that people who were engaged with politics might be thinking economically, but they're not at all. The people disengaged with politics are thinking economically, and the people engaged with politics are thinking culturally. And as more of America becomes more political,

engaged. This might be another scare the shit out of you moment, Andrew. As more of America becomes politically engaged, this research suggests that the future of politics is a culture war. Not a what will this policy do for me. Not a what will Biden do

for the broken road and the broken bridge and the bad broadband in my zip code, but rather what does it mean to my Facebook group, to my neighborhood Bible study group, if I support this president's bill. That is terrifying that the future of politics is so post-material and so cultural that

storytelling essentially subsumes actual policy details. Politics has become content, Derek. I'm very, very scared of it, too. And when you characterize as a vibes war is not the aside. It's actually the center. It's actually, hey, let's like engage in a vibes war. Like, see who can convince 50.1% of the population that, you know, we're on track. I also was very moved by that research. And I referenced Jonathan Haidt fairly heavily. I reference Ezra Klein fairly heavily.

Like some of their insights were what led me to head this direction and start the forward party because I looked up and was like, okay, if it really is just going to come down to tribalism and not whether I can demonstrate that my policies are going to help you. you, then where does that lead? And it leads to, by the way, Civil War 2.0. And then what is the path out? And the path out to me is one to start a unifying positive political tribe, but also to try and break up the two tribes so that there are like five, six or seven tribes. And then in that landscape, then if you have these relatively ideological communications lanes, at least you're not going to get 50% of people, you know, like I can inflame a certain segment.

which by the way would also lead to something that I imagine you're for, which is a much more diverse media landscape where it's not that you have an apparatus that's just augmenting the Republican point of view and talking points and then like the Democrat, but that there's some other universe. And I would say that you're one of actually the leaders of this universe, which is you try and find objective reality. You try to like presented to people in this way. It'd be like reality-based journalism, which, you know, a lot of journalists right now imagine that they're practicing, but I'm not sure they are. That's you are. I'm going to say this. That's a high compliment coming from me. I really appreciate that. I really do, I sincerely appreciate that. I really do try to tell the truth.

And it sounds ridiculous and cliche to say that I want to tell the truth. But I really, really do. And a part of, I think, really wanting to tell the truth as an occupation means just downshifting rather dramatically what tribe or what corner of the political spectrum the truth seems to be coming from. So right now, for example, we've got inflation. Inflations here, it's really high in energy, it's pretty high in meat and poultry, and it's pretty high in car prices. Now, there are a lot of Republicans that are saying completely, wrong things about inflation. Like we're, why in my republic? Like, inflation is 20%, like we're about to spiral

into, you know, a journey in 1920 situation. Venezuela. That's all bullshit. Obviously, that's complete bullshit. At the same time, I really do see a lot of liberals. And I'm not, I'm not trying to do both sides here. I'm just saying it's unfortunate the degree to which lots of people in the media now seem to be putting ideology over evidence. I see lots of liberals sort of poo-pooing the idea that anyone would care about inflation, that it's basically just a Republican sci-op. It's like, it's not just a Republican sci-op. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is telling you, in its own words, this is the highest inflation rate in 30 years. Let's believe them. These are nonpartisan economists believe reality. And I have found it, I do think that the fact that media has become

so ideological is, unfortunately, downstream of the fact that media, media has become so abundant. We are like, you know, we're like plants in the jungle. We're like plants in a rainforest. We are diversifying and becoming specific and different because we need to do so to survive. And you're seeing everyone feeling like they have to have an antagonistic relationship with the rest of media. Like, how often do you hear, like, people in the media say the media is broken? Well, of course they are, because their job is to win an audience. within the media-consuming public that thinks that they are the only voice

is telling the truth. Like, to a certain extent, someone could have accused me of doing this, the beginning of this answer, right? Like, right is wrong, let's is wrong, only I am telling the truth. I don't want to say that. But at the same time,

this is just, what I'm saying is the character of the media that you are observing is downstream of the media economy, which is so abundant that there are, and there's so many people clamoring for attention, that we all have to,

tell, we all have to have some version of the same message. Everyone else is lying except for me. Come to me for the truth. Come to me for the truth. Come to me for the truth and you will live. And that does make it, I think, very difficult to be non-ideological. And I honestly don't have a, I wish I had a quick solution to that problem. I frankly don't. I don't know if you see this the same way that I do. I see it exactly the same. And I'm working out a solution, believe or not in true Yangian fashion. Tell me your solution. Let's talk about your solution.

My solution, and there'll be more to come on this, is to try to augment and properly resource independent voices that have developed a trusted following based upon some degree of loyalty and adherence to the truth. People like you, frankly, you know, and I could throw out some other names. I'm just going to throw out a couple of names so people have a sense of where I'm going with this. but like Crystal Ball and Saga and Jetty, they've developed a following as independent, trustworthy voices.

I want to help make these voices the new network, the new mainstream. And so I'm working on trying to make that happen. We'll see if I can be successful. Certainly, I want to be a part of trying to give us a chance to come back and have a sense of reality and have a sense of accountability to the truth. And I don't see a way to do that without making it so that, the resources and incentives are flowing in the right direction. Yeah. I think from a political perspective, I wonder how you see the challenge of winning the

storytelling battle. You have this, you made this observation that you printed in the book. You said, the Democratic Party, which with, I think you're often politically aligned, but I do see why you're interested in forming a third party. You see, the Democratic Party has taken on this role of the urban coastal elites who are more concerned about policing various cultural issues than improving the working class's way of life that's been declining. Say a little bit more about that argument and what you disagree with the Democratic Party's approach to talking about cultural issues. Well, that quotes from a CNN clip that was pretty widely recirculated, but it was born in my experience talking to a waitress in a diner in Iowa,

where I said, hey, I'm running for president. And she said, oh, what party? And I said, Democrat, then it's like I spreaded horns or a tail or turned purple or something. So like the Democratic Party has really been coded in a certain way for a lot of people. And if you were generous, you would say, oh, it's because of, you know, Fox and conservative talk radio. And I'm sure there's some truth to that. But it does seem to a lot of working class Americans that I met that the Democratic Party does not care about whether their lives are good or bad.

and that's a losing place to be if you're the Democratic Party, which theoretically is supposed to be, I thought, for the working class and the little guy and little gal. And so then the question is, well, what do these people think the Democratic Party is about? And they think it's about language. They think it's about culture. They think it's about things that educated people in cities care about more than folks who are in Iowa or Indiana or New Hampshire. So that was the critique I had and still do have. And to me, the goal should be to try and get policies across the finish line. And it doesn't matter what I call it. I mean, it's one reason why we called universal basic income the freedom dividend because it tested better.

And it tested better, frankly, with conservatives. Like I used to tell the story, Derek, where everything tested about the same with people who were on the left. You called it universal basic income, prosperity, dividend, social. security for all. It was all about the same. By the way, back then it wasn't that high. I mean, it started out at 27% approval. Now it's like 65. But we called it the freedom dividend because it worked more with more people. And you have to ask yourself, it's like, why is it that Democrats aren't able to make the same adjustment, which is so obvious? It's like, hey,

if you talk about something in a certain way, they hate it. So it's like, maybe talk about it another way. And the Democratic stubbornness seems to be like, no. If they aren't liking this, then their ears are wrong or their minds are wrong, and they're not receptive enough to like the language I'm using. And by the way, they exacerbate that because they like change the language all the time. You know, they're really excited. It's like, you know, I'm pretty hip and savvy of this stuff. It's like, even I have trouble keeping track of what, you know, like what the vocabulary is. It was like trying to reach people where they are. So anyway, that was what my point was. Yeah, right. No, that the, the vocabulary that used

can be alienating. I can absolutely see that. To what extent do you think universal basic income right now and popularity of UBI has been affected by the pandemic stimulus checks? Well, you see the appeal of universal basic income rising, and I got two main objections when I was on the trail. Number one is where are we going to get the money? And number two is people aren't going to use it well. And now people realize we actually always had the money. And, of the literally, you know, 160 million Americans who've gotten some form of cash relief over this last number of months, they know how they spent it, which was on food and fuel and car repairs and school supplies and the rest of it, or the folks who are continuously

getting the child tax credit right now. So because of lived experience, a lot of people like, oh, like we really can do this and, oh, it doesn't turn everyone into a different human being. So I feel like this time period has only accelerated the eventual adoption of UBI. And I think it's just going to continue to become the policy solution as dozens of mayors around the country, including in some really big cities, are now launching various versions and pilots. There was an early objection to universal basic income that said it's going to change the way that people spend their money and spend their time,

they're going to become lazy, they're not going to work. And instead, everything that I've read seems to point in the opposite direction. That, in fact, what you have in the developing world, the sort of ascending developing world, is you have a lot of poverty traps. People, quote unquote, act poor, not because of biology, psychology, culture, because of money. They are in poverty traps.

They need money. And if they had money, they could be unbelievably, productive and happy and and I love the idea of of leading of leading with UBI. To what extent do you, is it still the centerpiece of the forward party? Is it, is it, is it the core? Is it the entree or is it other other things that have joined the plate? Well, it's very much there front and center. When you go to forward party.com, you see there are a number of core principles and universal basic incomes right there. I, you know, I'm frankly, Mr. UBI.

Which I'm very proud of. It's like having someone say to me on the street like, hey, yang. Literally I get thanked for people's cash relief checks. I mean, that's a pretty wonderful feeling. So it's right there. What's interesting, Derek, is I ran for president thinking the problem was that people didn't know about UBI and so I needed to spread the idea.

And now I think the problem is that our government isn't responsive to the will of the average person. and so that's what the democracy reform elements of the Forward Party are about around open primaries and rank choice voting. So if universal basic income is, for example, a solution or a vision, now the forward party is about trying to make it a reality. And you could, in my opinion, swap out any of a number of big things for universal basic income and it would fit in similarly climate change, you know, and trying to address it. Like, I think that's something that a lot of Americans are frustrated by our relative inaction. Like, our system right now is built for polarization, dysfunction, stagnation, frustration, eventual, you know, it's like you could put in just about any big policy goal.

Negative asian, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You can, it's like what Francis Fukuyama called the beatocracy. It's like, I can't do anything, right? I can't keep you from doing anything, which in a time of rapid change is terrible. You know, and then it's related to the gerontocracy, which I talk about. a little bit. And, you know, some people aren't into the fact that I characterize it as such. But it really is. I mean, you know, we're probably careening towards a Biden-Trump rematch in

2024. And their combined age will be 158. You know, it's like, they're going to look up, be like, oh, my gosh, like, we're doing this again. It's not going to be fantastic. So let me, let me assume that I am, and this is not a huge or unrealistic assumption, Assume that I am exactly the demographic that you're trying to reach. I am mad at the gerontocracy and think that America's leaders are way too old. I'm mad at the Vitocracy, Francis Fukuyama's Vitocracy, and think it's way too difficult to build anything or do anything. The moonshots are over, and we don't have any ambitious plans for government-funded technology anymore unless we're in a pandemic. I want a government that is pro-tech and pro-science, but also pro-agalitarianism.

I want us to care about people and the UBI, I think, is a wonderful way to express that care. All of this, I'm on your team. At the same time, I remember Ross Perot, I remember Ralph Nader, I know the history of third parties in America, and they can often cannibalize from the party that you are most like. This has to be something that you've been asked and somebody that you've thought about a lot. How do you worry about that risk? Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, well, I appreciate all of the affinities. just expressed Derek. It's super exciting. So there are a number of things I would say is that number

one, we have to figure out how we're going to transition from this broken down duopoly to something better and more effective. And the path there, in my opinion, is just trying to make it so that independent points of view can come up regardless of what those points of view are. So to me, the forward party is going to enable a multi-party system by trying to make the system, frankly, not shut out anyone who's not an R or a D. If you want to get into brass tax about some of the examples you even cited, Ross Perot led to Clinton winning. You know, I mean, he got 19.3% of the vote.

Oh, I mean Ross Perra stole from Republicans. Yeah, go ahead, though. Yeah, yeah, I know. So it, and you could look at Andrew Yang and say, oh, like, you know, this, this guy or like this party is naturally like more demi. There are some facts that actually cut the other way where 42% of my supporters, when I was running as a Democrat in the Democratic presidential nomination, said they weren't sure they were going to support the Democratic nominee if it weren't me.

And so that's almost half at a time when, frankly, I had a big D next to my name everywhere I went. Like that there were a lot of people I encountered on the trail were like, hey, Yang, you know, would totally support him if he wasn't a Democrat. And if you look at the appetite for a third party right now, it's actually significantly higher among both independents and Republicans than it is among Democrats. So it's an empirical open question where the energy would come from.

The other thing is that people that tend to fast forward to just the presidential race, this 2024 question. And there are a lot of things we can do at the local level, at the state level, like we did in Alaska around, I mean, I didn't do it, like Alaska did, around switching to open primaries and ranked choice voting, which it's good for democracy. It's good for insanity and reasonableness to just have better incentives. So there are all of these things I would push people towards and say, look, even if you're concerned about, let's say, the 2024 election, let's table that, do as much as we can in the here

right now, let's call it 22, and then if we are heading in a direction where you're like, uh-oh, I'm concerned about empirically tipping the election in a direction I don't like, then we can examine it then, but we're nowhere near that point right now. Just for my podcast, could you explain what ranked choice voting and open primaries are and how they would directly connect to breaking this duopoly between Republicans and Democrats, as you've described it? Of course. I'm very happy to share.

So Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has been in the news a lot lately because she's the only Republican senator who voted to impeach Donald Trump, who's also up for re-election in 2022. So her approval rating now among Alaskan Republicans stands at 6%, which is very, very low. And so you'd think, oh, this is politically suicidal and she's going to lose her seat. But last year Alaska shifted from party primary. which we're all used to, to a combination of open primaries and rank choice voting. So what does that shift mean in real life? It means that anyone can run from any party in the quote-unquote primary,

and then any voter can support whomever they want. And the top five candidates in that case in Alaska go through to the general. Now, if you have five candidates, and let's say there are two Republicans and one Democrat and one independent and one libertarian, then the two Democrats would, cannibalize from each other, and that's like the spoiler effect that everyone's concerned about. So the way you fix that is through a process called rank choice voting, which enables all voters to rank up to five candidates that they'd like to support in order. So if you were a Democrat, you could rank the Democrats one and two and then stop there. So then the candidates don't

cannibalize each other. You could also rank the independent one, the Democrat two, and then not be concerned that you are voting for the independent was somehow going to help the other side win. It gets rid of the spoiler effect. It gets rid of the wasting of votes argument. It expresses people's true preference. It rewards more moderate candidates who can build a broader coalition because you have to have a majority of ballots in order to win. Whereas if you had a plurality voting system, as with the Bill Clinton example, I think he

won the presidency with something like 40, I don't know, 2% of the vote. vote. So ranked choice voting gets rid of all of these issues. And here's one of the things, Derek, that people should understand is that all of the things that you get beaten over the head with, it's like, oh, you're going to spoil it. Or, oh, you're going to mess it up for one team. Like, oh, you're going to waste your vote. All of that stuff is just a product of our current plurality voting system that is archaic and needs to be updated. If you change to rank choice voting, then all of a sudden, people can vote for whomever they want. The winner has to be on a majority of ballots. You can have new parties emerge. It gets rid of the spoiler effect. The entire

Ralph Nader, 2024 argument could disappear if we had ranked choice voting on the presidential level. So if someone's scared of these issues, just say, hey, look, we switch to rank choice voting. Problem solved. I'm sympathetic to the argument. I think that we see internationally that countries that have first past the post electoral democracies do tend to become two-party. systems, and that's exactly what we have. And it's been very, very difficult for third parties in the U.S. to get started. I would love a proliferation of parties. I think it would help so many surprising second order things. Like, for example, political polarization, if everyone can just sort themselves by saying I'm against or I'm for Joe Biden and I'm going to describe the economy

that way and I'm going to see reality that way, it's too easy. It's too easy, I think, to have that sort of, you know, head-to-head death match. But when partisanship is scrambled a little bit, when there are five parties, six parties, seven parties, then there's more of a competition to not just be against something, but be for the right thing. Because everyone's against everything, but maybe you specialize and become for a really, really particularly persuasive argument. So I love the idea. Right now, Derek, you can see the animating force for a, both parties is hating the other party. Well, look, I think the book is really, really interesting.

And I wanted, the last question I wanted to ask you that was related to the book is, you know, you, I have no idea what it's like to run for president. You make this really funny comment that a lot of people think that only narcissists run for president. And it may be true that most people that run for president are somewhat narcissistic, but the actual experience of running for president is just, just one humble pie after another. It's just this ego-smashing exercise where one media beats up at you, someone insults you. It just seemed really, really difficult. I wonder from that experience,

like on the other end of the media equation, what you see as the political media's biggest flaws in this country? I think the political media's biggest flaw is that they feel themselves to be the arbiter of what narrative gets included and what does not. And I use in the book the example of Joe Sestak, who was an admiral in the Navy and was eminently qualified to talk about certainly foreign policy and defense-related issues. And the media wouldn't give him the time of day because he wasn't quote-unquote serious. I heard from any number of people. I had an interview with Barry Weiss the other day and she said that New York Times journalists would regularly exclude me from coverage of a debate or the campaign. And when I asked, hey, why not have Yang on there?

They would say, like, Yang is not serious. And then when I talked to Barry about it, I was like, hey, how does a reporter know whether I'm serious? And then the answer is other reporters. There's like a circularity going on. And so I wish that political media would just show up and be, like, treat themselves like an alien, being like, okay, what's going on? Like, who's this? What's that? The problem is that right now a lot of journalists have pre-existing connections with folks who are already in office or who've been in politics for a long time. And so there'll be this continuous treatment of certain people as more legitimate or worthy of consideration than others. And on my campaign, we talked all the time about how the media was trying to make a particular person that

thing. You can almost see, like, the media got to turn towards it. I don't think I, you know, it's like, I think that we had like a very strange set of experiences when the media is concerned, but I wish that folks would, would in some ways, take themselves less seriously. You know what I mean? Like, like, oh, if I somehow expose my readers or viewers to this, then like, it's my signing off on them. It's like, look, just bring people on and let voters decide. That, There's some asymmetry in this, too, Derek, where I think that, yeah, I think that one side is better than the other at trying to get out of the way. So that that would be my thought on it. But I'm glad you read and took an interest in that part of the book.

Running for president certainly was a bizarre set of experiences. I don't think most people understand what it's like. And so I tried to break it down in a way that most people could relate to and hopefully find enjoyable. I thought it was so interesting how the combination of what must be utterly exhilarating moments and utterly boring moments that you must go between. That speaking in front of a crowd, being on primetime TV on a stage to audition to be the most powerful person in the world, like that just must be an extraordinary thrill. And at the same time, because you are on the trail all the time, just the travel, the mind-numbing hours of just going between, I'm sure, wonderful cities. but like I'm exhausted when I fly across the country once.

Like to have that be your life for a year and a half just must be totally enervating. And so I just found that it opened my eyes the fact that you must have, there must be really high highs followed by lows, followed by highs. And it must just really sort of churn your insides and be a really sort of psychologically discombobulating experience. Well, Derek, you just hope there are some really high highs, man. I mean, like, the thing I compare my experience to is like a traveling comedian where you show up to a town and then there's like a small group and then you give them your message or your stuff and then you hope that they like it. And then you literally come back to that town a number of months later and you're like, you hope that the crowd is bigger. And so when you talk about like the high highs, none of the highs were guaranteed on the Yang campaign.

You know what I mean? You know, like, there's no guarantee I'd be on that debate stage. There's no guarantee there'd be a crowd waiting for me. It was all. And there weren't crowds waiting for me. To your point, early on, like, I'd show up and there'd be nobody there. And, you know, the people that were there would not take you seriously because you'd be like, hey, I'm running for president. And they'd be like, really?

You know, like, I managed to run the gamut of experiences where one thing that just pops to mind. I attended the Iowa State Fair in 20. 2018, I'd already declared. And it was really, really punishing on a certain level because just no one cared, no one believed. Like, I had a young idealistic staffer with me who like urged me to just like run up to people and like introduce myself. And I was like, look, I'm really not going to just like mess with other people's like trip to the fair just to like stick my face and theirs and be like, hey, I remember it's like, like, let's just get some lemonade and turkey and try and act like human beings here.

And then I came back to that same fair the following year, and there was this phalanx of camera people around me and a video camera and the rest of it. And people had heard of me because I'd been on a debate stage or whatnot. And so, like, the experience was different, but there was no guarantee we'd ever get to the second version of it. You know what I mean? So when you talk about, like, the highest high. It's like it was just a grind for a long time.

And even in the headier days of the campaign, to your point, you would wake up in a Best Western and get up early and then do a local radio interview and then get back in the rental vehicle and just try and put your best foot forward. It must be exhausting. It's exhausting to think about. I have one more question just about running for president. And maybe it's a weird question. I don't know if you've been asked this before. Anything you do for a long time you get better at. Like you don't have to go full 10,000 hours theory of Malcolm Gladwell to believe. believe that as you do something for more hours, you tend to get a little bit better at it. What is this skill that you think you improved on the most running for president? Like the skill set of running for president to me is totally bewildering. But like, you've done it. What are you better at now than you were four years ago? I am better at performing, Derek. And I think I referenced this in the book. But you do get reps. I hated these cable news appearances so much when you're staring at this

red dot and you're pretending to have a compelling conversation with someone. Even I thought to myself afterwards, I was like, it's not like I'd watch one of those cable news hits. I'd be like, that guy should be president. So it's like, turn to my team. I'd be like, hey, do I even have to do these? They're so awful. And months later, when CNN actually signed me up as a contributor, and I was on air, I'd be like, I hated these. I suck at these. And now apparently, like, I must not be that terrible because, you know, news network decided that they'd like more of it. So, you know, what I got better at. I got better at performing in different types of environments. I got better at staring at a news camera. I got better at talking to 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people. I got better at

trying to hold an arena. You know, and if you look online, like, there were speeches I gave to arenas of sometimes, you know, like not gang gang. It would be like random Democratic voters. And so you get these reps. And now my wife jokes, too, it's like, if I have a speaking gig now, like, they'll throw me out. And in the spectrum of my performance, you know, experience, it's like, okay, this group's

like 500 people or whatever. It's like, you know, 500 people is not that big. deal, whereas, like, you know, rewind earlier and be like, five with the people, that'd be incredible. That's fascinating. Andrew, this has been so interesting. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.